Pick two poets who seem to have nothing to do with each other — a Gothic American and a pastoral Englishman, say — and see where the catalogue actually joins them: overlapping years, shared ground, distinctive themes, and the poems that secretly rhyme.
Wallace Stevens stands as one of the most enigmatic and profound voices in American poetry—a philosophical poet who balanced a successful corporate career with the creation of some of the most intellectually challenging and aesthetically innovative verse of the 20th century. His poetry, characterized by its luxuriant language, philosophical depth, and preoccupation with the imagination's relationship to reality, cont…
“To have nothing to say and to say it in a tragic manner is not the same thing as having something to say.”
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Modernist Poets, Nature Poets, Symbolist Poets
Stephen Phillips, born on 28 July 1864 and dead at the distressingly early age of fifty-one on 9 December 1915, was one of the most celebrated English poets and verse dramatists of the years around 1900. For a brief but dazzling period, he seemed to many readers and theatre-goers to be the writer most likely to renew English poetic drama after Tennyson and Browning. His plays filled theatres, his poetry was widely re…
Neighbourhood:
Death & Mortality, Decadent Poets, Dramatic Poets, Edwardian Poets, Love Poets, Victorian Poets
They overlapped for 37 years (1879–1915).
When Wallace Stevens was born, Stephen Phillips was about 15.
Wallace Stevens was about 36 when Stephen Phillips died.
About 5,639 km separate
Reading, Pennsylvania, USA from
Summertown, Oxford, England.
Different countries, different weather — unless a poem carries one landscape into the other.
Wallace Stevens:
reading, pennsylvania, harvard university, george santayana, harmonium, sunday morning, the emperor of ice-cream, thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird, the snow man.
Stephen Phillips:
summertown, oxford, cicely chilcott, paolo and francesca, christ in hades, marpessa, trinity college cambridge, verse drama revival.
Poems that secretly rhyme
The closest poem-to-poem matches in critique space — the sort of kinship a listener hears before the catalogue admits it.
